A detail of “The Great Gatbsy” poster from Spineless Classics reveals much of the text of the classic book.

British company Spineless Classics has a novel approach to creating posters: it uses the novel itself as the art.

The company turns famous books like “The Hobbit,” “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” and “Brave New World” into posters not by illustrating characters or scenes, but by artfully rearranging the text of the books. As in: if you were OCD enough and had a few hours to kill, you could actually read the entire book from the poster.

That may sound headache-inducing but it’s surprisingly not, as I learned when the company sent me a fetching “A Clockwork Orange” poster a few weeks ago to mark their introduction to the U.S. market (the posters are online now but will soon be available locally at the Tattered Cover).

We caught up with Byron Peretsky, the manager for Spineless Classics’ Denver-based U.S. operation, to talk about whether it’s gimmick or art, and the future prospects for a company that serves a seemingly narrow niche market — but that already has competition in the form of Cambridge, Mass.-based Litographs.